Mother Tongue: Sixteenth-Century Sephardi Women's Contributions to Judeo-Spanish

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dc.contributorRomero-Diaz, Nieves
dc.contributorBen-Ur, Aviva
dc.contributorWatson, Matthew
dc.contributorGubitosi, Patricia
dc.contributor.advisorCastro Cuenca, Esther
dc.contributor.authorLeighty, Madison
dc.date.accessioned2019-06-28T20:19:51Z
dc.date.available2019-06-28T20:19:51Z
dc.date.gradyear2019en_US
dc.date.issued2019-06-28
dc.description.abstractUpon their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula, which began in 1391 and culminated in the issuing of the Alhambra Decree in 1492, the Sephardim who migrated to the Ottoman Empire continued and adjusted their cultural and religious traditions in the diaspora. A central element of the Sephardi culture's survival was the continued use of Judeo-Spanish, which descended from dialects of Ibero-Romance to become the heritage language of the Sephardi people in the diaspora. This thesis explores women's usage of Judeo-Spanish in the sixteenth century -- the first full century after the 1492 expulsion -- and their contributions to the language's preservation. The text of Rabbi Meir Benveniste's Seder Nashim (1565), as well as the thematic and lyrical content of various Ottoman Sephardi romance and kantiga ballad traditions, suggest that Sephardi women, who used Judeo-Spanish as their primary form of communication during the sixteenth century, influenced the language's cultural significance and the preservation of certain lexical and grammatical features.en_US
dc.description.sponsorshipOther or Special Majoren_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10166/5706
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States*
dc.rights.restrictedpublicen_US
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/*
dc.subjectJudeo-Spanishen_US
dc.subjectSephardi Judaismen_US
dc.subjectwomenen_US
dc.subjectlanguage preservationen_US
dc.titleMother Tongue: Sixteenth-Century Sephardi Women's Contributions to Judeo-Spanishen_US
dc.typeThesis
mhc.degreeUndergraduateen_US
mhc.institutionMount Holyoke College

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